Intel Bay Trail-T performance is good but pricing remains concern

Sources from tablet makers told DigiTimes that they're pleased with the performance of Bay Trail-T, Intel's upcoming tablet SoC that is anticipated to arrive in December. The platform's performance and power consumption are reportedly satisfying, but pricing remains a concern. Currently, Intel is pricing the Bay Trail-T chips at around $20-30 and the vendors believe pricing would need to drop to $15 to have a good chance of competing with ARM-based chips such as those from Qualcomm, MediaTek and NVIDIA.

Intel's Bay Trail-T platform features the company's latest 22nm Silvermont architecture and has significant improvements in power consumption and performance. The platform also features new Gen 7 graphics technology to enhance graphics performance and with support for DirectX 11, meaning the platform is also capable of running PC applications and games.

The Bay Trail-T platform will support both Android 4.2 and Windows 8.1 operating systems. The Bay Trail-T/Windows 8.1 platform will be shipped starting the end of October, while the Bay Trail-T/Android 4.2 platform is set to be released in mid-November.